The tops of her breasts showing above the surface distracted me – whenever she stirred her nipples bobbled up into view, pastel pink, an after-dinner mint color, centering perfect circles of slightly paler, delicately pebbled skin. I speculated on how it would be, screwing in her bone bedchamber, and compared her physicality to Ex’s heavy-breasted, thick-waisted body, her areolae large and oblate to the point of appearing misshapen. Though Ex had thrown me out, though we both slept with other people, I trusted that we would get back together. The relationship was too comfortable for either of us to discard. I had a trickle of guilt because Yara was prettier than she, yet guilt was not strong enough to prevent me from swimming over and putting an arm beneath her thighs to support her legs. Heat streamed off her. With my free hand I cleared strands of damp hair away from her face and started to move in for a kiss, but she held me off and leaned back further, as if hoping for a better perspective.
‘I want to be lucky for you,’ she said.
I mustered a glib response, something about getting lucky, but kept it to myself – there was nothing playful in her face, no indication of banter in her delivery and, with desire thickening my voice, I told her I could use a little luck.
While our supper (chicken and saffron rice) grew cold, we went at it hard on the waterbed. Yara was energetic and inventive, alternately demanding and giving, but the sex was merely good, merely proficient, and not great. As sometimes happens there was an element of performance art to our little exercise that diminished its other qualities and hampered emotional involvement. Her moans and cries were sweet to hear, but I recognized that she was in part emoting. Not faking it, exactly. Just throwing in a few extras to make sure I knew that she was having a grand time, and my execution was the masculine equivalent of hers. What surprised me was that instead of the usual pillow talk we discussed this afterward, analyzing our lovemaking in terms of its authenticity.
‘When attractive people hook up,’ Yara said, ‘narcissism sometimes gets in the way of things.’
‘I don’t consider myself a narcissist,’ I said.
‘Be honest!’
‘Actually I’m more of a self-hater.’
She blew air through her lips, a disparaging puff. ‘You don’t think it’s possible to be a self-hating narcissist?’
‘I guess you could say self-hatred is an extreme form of narcissism.’
‘It’s the soul of narcissism. Self-love and self-hatred aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, one’s a precursor to the other.’
I clasped my hands behind my head – the play of light across the ceiling gave the bone a creamy, cheese-like appearance.
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen. Did you think I was older?’
‘I didn’t think much about it, but yeah, maybe a couple of years.’
‘And now you think I’m too young for you? Is that it? I should hope not, because I’ve been with guys older than you. A lot older!’
It was a peculiar conversation and her part in it seemed sophisticated for someone so young, but this digression made me aware that her personality was mostly posture and an occasional blurt of teenage defensiveness. I told her age didn’t matter to me and that mollified her.
‘It’s strange,’ she said, returning to the topic at hand. ‘I think self-love is decaying into self-hate in your case. Usually it’s the other way around.’
‘I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve been afflicted with a mixture of the two ever since I was fifteen.’
‘Since the girls got interested, eh?’
‘Nah, it was when I began using them to get at their mommies . . . that’s when the self-hate kicked in.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The girls I knew had some hot moms.’
‘You had sex with them?’
‘A few. Rene . . . my first mom. She came on to me while her daughter was out running errands. It made me a big deal in high school.’
‘You told your friends about it? What an asshole!’
‘I was fifteen, an idiot. And Rene told her friends. She even set me up with one of them. No one got hurt and I learned a few things.’
‘About sex?’
‘Sex . . . and women.’
Yara sighed – a sigh of forbearance, I figured. ‘The moms must have been bored with their husbands.’
‘I didn’t think about them. They were targets to me. I suppose they were bored. With their husbands, and themselves. But I don’t believe that’s what motivated them. It was the idea they were corrupting me that got them off. They needed that kind of excess in their lives. So I played the innocent and let myself be corrupted. It got to be a thing with me, bagging mothers and their daughters. When the moms found out their little Madisons and Brooks were fucking me, too, they were deeply pissed. But after they cooled down, a couple of them suggested threesomes.’
‘You must have thought you were a wicked boy.’
‘I was wicked.’
‘In an innocent way, maybe.’
Channeled through some complexity of bone, a warm breeze penetrated the chamber, producing a mournful whistle.
Yara turned onto her side, facing me. ‘I wasn’t interested in sex until last year.’
